Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962)
A self-possessed, yet self-obsessed, pop singer is anxiously waiting all afternoon to hear the results of a test that may diagnose her with cancer.
JADE
I am still caught on your idea that one wants to see a beautiful person on film. On one hand, yes, I think this is true. Film is a visual medium and best displays what is visually beautiful, rather than what is spiritually beautiful or poetically beautiful or musically beautiful. Yet in Hollywood today we are seeing a grotesque display of what happens when this is taken too far: a strange world of cardboard cut outs where the aesthetic phenomena is centered entirely on a superficial beauty. This obsession with beauty above all reveals the fragility of beauty when it stands alone. Real beauty, I would argue, is a result of bravery. Rawness, truth, putting things to the test, all work as a refining process, producing beauty as a consequence and not the ultimate centerpiece.
Cléo is the grandmother of this current anxious, fragile beauty. It is her anxious, neurotic fear of death which sets the stage for starlets like Kim Kardashian to pioneer the field of plastic surgery. The worst thing about this kind of beauty is precisely that it does not age. It is stagnant, rotting, robbing itself of its potential to become ancient and eternal by its desperate clinging to youthful beauty.
ALEX
Cléo presents us with such a penetrating examination of this very hollowness that she attains grace all over again. We sympathize with this character, even seeing her troubles as self-inflicted.
The context is what creates the beauty, and the context is what's missing from modern portrayals of superlative female forms. The director of any given Netflix drama does not have sufficient love for her starlet to know what lighting would best frame her, which outfits, which relationships, which city.
Director Agnès Varda takes an undeveloped immature beauty, and showcases her divinity in direct juxtaposition to her pettiness by illustrating her relationships, her city, her talents, and her psychology. To truly understand someone is often also to love them.
JADE
What I love about Varda is that she always looks with the Lover’s eye–that is, she understands. It is now treated as a tired cliché for filmmakers to fall in love with their actresses. Perhaps this cynical attitude toward seeing with the Lover’s eye is what makes present films so charmless. Agnès Varda herself said “The first feminist gesture is to say: ‘OK, they're looking at me. But I'm looking at them.’ The act of deciding to look, of deciding that the world is not defined by how people see me, but how I see them.” Yet she spent so much of her time making feminist films, looking not as much on man as on woman. With all her work reframing women, she defaulted on the opportunity of framing men. Imagine if Agnes Varda took on my earlier suggestion of making a Bond film through the female gaze. This would represent a truly new combination!
It’s clear to me Varda could do it. She lays out the plot of the movie in the beginning with Cléo’s tarot cards, much in the way the MI6 director lays out the mission for 007. I imagine Varda would make more sensual use of visual cues, like the movements of men’s hands, or the minute details of Bond’s hotel rooms, to indicate where the plot intends to go, rather than forced exposition dumps from undeveloped authority figures. There would be a dramatic emphasis on the hands. In the same way that Cléo appears as a beautiful starlet walking through the everyday world, we would get this flattering sense of the Bond figure as a man of intrigue, a physical sense of gravity emanating from his presence simply by setting him in contrast with his surroundings.
ALEX
The success of Cléo’s “secret agent mission” is, like all things Cléo, subconscious, flighty, and largely accidental. When she, in wonder of herself, announces “I think my fear is gone… I think I’m happy,” we do not fully understand the process that has acted throughout the runtime to ease her frightened mind from denial of death to acceptance, yet it is still displayed in subtle cues timed with the passing summer day: Her tantrum with her bandmates ends in throwing off her wig, which until that moment is accepted by the audience as her real hair. In her calm moments of walking in the park and meeting Antoine, it’s revealed for the first time that her name is actually Florence. The spectre of death acts to dispel the illusions of her identity, and opens her to the well of stability waiting within.
JADE
Is dispelling illusions not, in itself, a heroic act? This is a primary role of any Good Witch or Wizard. The Wizard of Oz simply reveals to Dorothy’s party that they each already possess the attributes they seek. Sophie Hatter only needs to voice her confidence in Howl in order for him to feel emboldened and become the hero he needs to be. Still, this begs the question: do your characters have to be idiots in order for this conflict to exist? I disliked Cléo’s character when I first watched this film: I couldn't respect her intelligence! She strikes me as willfully blind. More accurately she is the Sleeping Beauty archetype.
ALEX
Cléo defaults on the opportunity to model heroism for the audience because of how accidentally and instinctively she finds redemption. The power of a human to steer her own destiny is instead illustrated by Agnès Varda making the film in the first place. Her unique voice is striking and clear from the very first moments of Cléo, directing and editing with such effortlessness that one is made to feel that anyone can tell stories with film, and all of the mundane world is waiting for its inner beauty to be brought forth by proper framing and lighting.
This clear power of woman is only reflected by Cléo’s friend Dorothée, who moves with an easy grace, through a world that’s meant for her to grapple with, and be adored by. The camera is meant for Varda’s eyes; all the seas of Parisian traffic and populace seem to flow in the direction Varda wishes it to. Both Varda and Dorothée have integrated the animus and anima: a commanding director’s hand, joined with a flowing and feminine gaze that loves everything it touches.
JADE
Interestingly, through all her feminist works, Varda never returns to that image of the heroic feminine we see in Dorothée, a perfect integration of Cléo’s fragile beauty and the brutal strength of the female taxi driver. Instead, Varda is perhaps best known for her film Vagabond, a portrait of a homeless woman who, through an anarchist impulse, seeks to break with society. “You wanted total freedom and you got total loneliness,” a man tells the tragic heroine in the middle of the film. It is a prophecy for our entire generation. By the end of the film, the heroine has frozen to death in a ditch. This is perhaps the most vivid image Varda presents to her audience through the course of her entire career. Yet I do not think of it: I think instead of Dorothée, getting out of the taxi cab and running, in her beautiful sundress, across the tree lined street and up the stone stairs, away and out of sight.